Start Anywhere

The school is a system. And it also convey its educational materials through a system that has a beginning and an end. But perhaps that is where the danger lies for design education. The design process itself is reiterative and it does not have a start point nor an ending. But as design educators roll out their pedagogy, too many times they are laid out in a linear fashion. And too many times design students accept it blindly without question.

I've never really blamed the school system since classes have to be presented in such a way so that it is progressive. But I guess what is sorely lacking is the fact that design educators forget to point out that the process that they are teaching is actually a cycle with parts that can be interchanged. There is no need to follow the laid out process in a straight line.

So if you find yourself at the next assignment scratching your head and wondering where to start, don't. Grab a pen, take a photo, build mock ups. You don't even have to go looking for that elusive inspiration. It will hit you in the face. The important thing is to start. Just start anywhere. If you don't start somewhere, you won't know for sure where your design direction should be coming from and where it should go.

Just start.
Start anywhere.

The Importance Of Role-Playing In The Design Process

For most designers ( most probably amateur or even student designers ), alot of thinking and designing happens in the head, gets drawn on paper and ideas are bounced off back and forth through discussion. But most of it just stops there.

I've just realized today however that even by having a simple piece of life-sized prop, helped unleashed hidden ideas. The prop got passed around, people subconciously acted out scenes even if they were joking about it. During the role-playing however, the actor may not be fully aware of his actions but his group mates acting as the observer however may spot certain key insighst that may not be apparent during the discussion.

This is one of the tools that I think should be used as an advancement of the mock-ups. Creating mock-ups helps the designer to visualize space, form and other physical elements. But by using it in a role-play, it will help the designer to evaluate his preconceived notions to see if it is being acted out in real life.

Thesis Design Directions

I'm pretty glad that the presentation went well yesterday with all 4 professors being able to see the design directions I had proposed. It is also partly because of smart decision making of me choosing this area. Since none of them are experts in it and that leaves me enough room to explore without them constantly giving me suggestions which I don't like.

I had proposed 3 possible directions for this thesis to continue:
1. Plaza| park
+ This proposal focuses on the redesign of the urban site. It would probably be a plaza. Given that a skate plaza tries to emulate the streets, this design however tries to emulate a skatepark without alienating the rest of the non-skating public.

2. Sit-able skate objects
+ Much smaller in scale compared to the plaza park. As the topic suggest, this design direction will concentrate on making skate structures having secondary functions like being seats or tables. It is not about designing a furniture that you can skate on it. Its about designing a skate obstacle that you can dine on.

3. Portable Fittings
+ This is probably the direction that I like most. This direction focuses on the idea of being able to have the required structures anywhere you want.

To illustrate my point, here are my full presentation panels that I showed yesterday:

Post Mortem

This will probably be the first post with regards to my thesis. It's been 8 weeks into the semester and my design direction has finally been set in stone. It's been a dizzying trip with a lot of round-abouts trying to convince the panel.

It'll be less than 8 more months left before I graduate. There a are a lot of things to do right now which includes getting the design report down into writing.

At this point of time things ar egoing along smoothly. Or at least that's the way I saw it. I've been less of a planner and concentrating more on being able to give my self options when faced with situations. Things seemed to work out that way better.

This post will also be a primer to greater blog changes to come as it will shift from being from a photoblog to an online compilation of my design work.

More post on my work soon.
That's all for now.

Random Musings

almost.dead.but.not.quite

Toh Guan Sunrise

to all the mornings that we missed

Sister and nephew